If Costas’s rant were instead about making abortion illegal, DB and friends would be outraged. You can play Mad Libs with the issue at stake, and whether or not it’s just to fire the talking head is entirely contingent upon whether or not you agree with his rhetoric.

Why am I not surprised that $DB sides with Costas. The blogosphere has been all over this topic today, the best comment I saw that I wish I could take credit for, but can’t, was this at Legal Insurrection:

walls | December 3, 2012 at 9:12 am
If he had run her over with a SUV, would Costas be calling for banning SUV’s?

If he had killed her by throwing a football at her head, would Costas be calling for banning footballs?

Costas is just another stupid, liberal idiot. His mama should be ashamed.

How come the 2 dozen+ murders per week committed by “urban yoot’ ” in Chicago never makes the news?

Oh, that’s right, they are professional voters for the Democratic party, and the full employment guarantee for Chicago teachers and Illinois prison guards unions, at least until the productive people’s money runs out.

A handgun’s sole purpose is to kill human beings? That’s really what you believe, JRH? I’d expect such ignorance from Dollar Bill but you’re usually more on top of things. But here are a few other uses: deterring crime, apprehending criminals, hunting, target shooting, collecting, paperweight. Those are a few – buy a gun for yourself and I’m sure you’ll discover more.

Okay, sure, it can be said more exactingly: unlike knives and SUVs, handguns derive their primary value from their capability to kill and maim other people. (I don’t think you believe that anywhere near the majority of handguns in this country are owned for hunting.) That’s why they’re of value in deterring (and committing) crime and apprehending (and abetting) criminals. That’s reason one why the “knife control!” argument doesn’t carry much weight. Reason two is that the numbers aren’t even closely comparable. (As for the flu…really?)

It’s also why we have exponentially more gun deaths here than other countries. Maybe you think that’s an acceptable price to pay for the laws we’ve decided to live under; but it is the price we pay. Of course, all of this hardly matters; the gun lobby has won its fight in this country, and any liberals who dream about eradicating guns in America are fantasizing as much as conservatives who haven’t yet accepted the reality that mass deportation is not an immigration policy.

Well maybe we could persuade the liberals to emigrate voluntarily to Japan, where there are practically no handguns – no mass deportations to offend your sensibilities, no guns to worry you, and those of us left here can happily shoot ourselves to death while y’all watch from the Pacific Rim, shaking your finger and sayin’ “we told you so!”

Right, EOSr, but that’s not what I said, is it? Handguns derive their only value* from their capacity to kill or injure people. That’s pretty different from saying that all gun owners want to kill or injure people — but that is the only reason they are useful.

*Yes, it’s true that some handgun owners hunt with their guns. So if you want, limit it to the (majority) of handguns. If you still want, limit it to those guns that were sensibly on the list of prohibited assault weapons. Try describing a source of the value of a TEC-9 that isn’t its ability to tear another human being to shreds. Or a military-grade rocket launcher. These are the kinds of weapons that the gun lobby has goaded Congress into saying are Americans’ birthright.

CF-
Thanks JRH for a good laugh at the end of the day. You would not know a TEC-9 if one fell out of the sky and bonked you in the head. As for “military-grade rocket launchers”-those are illegal and as far as I know none of us black-hat-wearing-mustache-twisting gun lobbyists are handing them out from the backs of trucks. Methinks too much Hollywood for you-perhaps turning off the boob tube and opening a book might help. Try starting with the Bill of Rights, where our founders guaranteed us the right to bear arms. And get this: it was not for sport hunting or recreational shooting or even self defense. It was to provide for the violent overthrow by the people of a tyrannical despot or corrupt government.
Recently in the NY Times some fool commented that the founders only advocated for the Second Amendment because the firearms of the time were muskets not machine guns. There are very few things that I am sure of in today’s world. But I am certain of this: If Thomas Jefferson were alive today he would marvel at these modern tools of democracy, own many and have a concealed carry permit.

WALLACE: What about… a weapon that can fire a hundred shots in a minute?

SCALIA: We’ll see. Obviously the Amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried — it’s to keep and “bear,” so it doesn’t apply to cannons — but I suppose here are hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes, that will have to be decided.

Police called the arson bomb squad, which confirmed that the device was a military rocket launcher; it was not loaded. It is legal to possess a rocket launcher as long as it is not loaded, police said.

And, no, the Court did not say that the Second Amendment is rooted in the overthrow rationale, but that it incorporated the common law right of self defense. (A great example of the folly of originalism. See the historians’ brief for more on that.)

“The folly of originalism” is the term applied by those who find that the Constitution thwarts their idea of how this country should be run. It’s employed by both sides, depending on whose ox is being gored but I tend to trust the generation of leaders who formed our government far more than the current crop, so with all due respect, I’ll defer to them rather than Harry Reid or even Richard Nixon.

Can you name me one example in history of a government’s transition to a totalitarian regime that hasn’t been preceded by gun control? Just one example, but a classic illustration: Austria. Their transformation from freedom to dictatorship was incremental, and gun control came in two stages: First there was gun registration, and then all private citizens were required to give up their guns.

Once the Austrian populace was unarmed, they had no way of defending themselves against the Nazi regime. Subsequently, political correctness replaced freedom of speech; taxes were increased to eighty percent; the nation was plagued with informers; and any dissenters who spoke against the government were arrested. You know the rest of the story.

It’s the boiling frog effect: if you drop a frog into a pot of scalding water, he’ll panic and jump right out. But if you immerse him in room-temperature water and then turn on the burner, he will happily boil to death, unaware of the threat until it’s too late.

Please tell me – what protection do we have against a similar fate in the US if we remove the Second Amendment?

That being said, anything can be used as a lethal weapon (in fact, that’s the whole premise behind the Krav Maga concept). The problem we have today is not the availability of these tools, it’s the tragic and stunning rise of sociopathy.